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Cream chargers have a variety of uses and they are not all related to whipped cream. If you’re looking for cream supplies, then the best place to look is online. You’ll be able to quickly find a store in your area that sells these products.
Refilling your whipped cream dispenser
There are three ways to make whipped cream — buy cream and use a fork or an egg beater, buy a disposable can of whipped cream or buy a whipped cream dispenser. The dispenser needs to be regularly refilled with cream chargers which are a steel cylinder or cartridge filled with nitrous oxide and which is used as a whipping agent. Some people prefer the cream dispenser to the other two methods, because it does not use electricity and they do not have to work either (it’s heavy work whipping your own cream with a fork).
Nitrous oxide is used in cream chargers because it easily moves through the cream and does not allow the cream to oxidize while it is in the can either. The cream is made by using 1 cup of heavy cream, 2-3 tablespoons of sugar, any flavoring and then using the charger to whip up the cream.
Most chargers that you can find in cream supplies stores are for small scale operations, such as home kitchens, restaurants and coffee shops. If you need whipped cream for a high volume of customers, then you might do better to find a company who can rent or sell you a regulated tank system that can dispense massive amounts of whipped cream at a rate of 10 liters per hour.
Model rockets
Hobbyists always have a way of using things in an unintended fashion, and the model rockets scene has also taken aboard the whipped cream charger as a surrogate child. In fact, they are used in micro hybrid engines where the nitrous oxide acts as an oxidizer for fuels such as HTPB or polyethylene.
A micro hybrid rocket is simply a special type of rocket that uses propellants in two different states of matter — one solid and the other a gas or a liquid. Hobbyists have been making these for at least 100 years and this is the basis for the NASA space program as well.
Drugs
Not to be outdone by the model rocketing pioneers, recreational drug users who cannot afford anything worthwhile have also improvised with cream chargers by inhalingthe nitrous oxide, which causes psychoactive effects. Gone are the days when glue sniffing and drinking ethanol from the pharmacy was all the rage, now we have whipped cream dispensers for laughing gas!
Nitrous oxide is dangerous because the gas can deprive a person of oxygen quickly enough to cause suffocation. Unfortunately, young people experimenting with gas masks, plastic bags and cream chargers have been known to die. But cream chargers have not been made illegal in most of the USA and they are considered in the same category as ethanol, kava, San Pedro cactus and nicotine.